skip to main content
10.1145/2047196.2047218acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesuistConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

IP-QAT: in-product questions, answers, & tips

Published: 16 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We present IP-QAT, a new community-based question and answer system for software users. Unlike most community forums, IP-QAT is integrated into the actual software application, allowing users to easily post questions, answers and tips without having to leave the application. Our in-product implementation is context-aware and shows relevant posts based on a user's recent activity. It is also designed with minimal transaction costs to encourage users to easily post, include annotated images and file attachments, as well as tag their posts with relevant UI components. We describe a robust cloud-based system implementation, which allowed us to release IP-QAT to 37 users for a 2 week field study. Our study showed that IP-QAT increased user contributions, and subjectively, users found our system more useful and easier to use, in comparison to the existing commercial discussion board.

Supplementary Material

JPG File (fp462.jpg)
WMV File (fp462.wmv)

References

[1]
Ackerman, M.S., and Malone, T.W. (1990). Answer Garden: a tool for growing organizational memory. ACM SIGOIS and IEEE CS TC-OA, 31--39.
[2]
Adamic L.A., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., Ackerman, M.S. (2008). Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. ACM WWW, 665--674.
[3]
Bouguessa, M., Dumoulin, B., and Wang, S. (2008). Identifying authoritative actors in question-answering forums: the case of Yahoo! Answers. SIGKDD, 866--874.
[4]
Brandt, J., Dontcheva, M., Weskamp, M., Klemmer, S.R. (2010). Example-centric programming: integrating web search into the development environment. ACM CHI, 513--522.
[5]
Chilana, P., Grossman, T., and Fitzmaurice, G. (2011) Modern Software Product Support Processes and the Usage of Multimedia Formats. ACM CHI, 3093--3102.
[6]
Dearman D and Truong KN. (2010). Why users of yahoo!: answers do not answer questions. CHI, 329--332.
[7]
Fiore, A.T., Tiernan, S.L., Smith, M.A. (2002). Observed behavior and perceived value of authors in usenet newsgroups: bridging the gap. CHI, 323--330.
[8]
Gray, W. D. and Boehm-Davis, D. A. (2000). Milliseconds Matter: An Introduction to Microstrategies and to Their Use in Describing and Predicting Interactive Behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6 (4), 322--335.
[9]
Grossman, T., Fitzmaurice, G., and Attar, R. (2009). A survey of software learnability: metrics, methodologies and guidelines. ACM CHI, 649--658.
[10]
Grossman, T. and Fitzmaurice, G. (2010). ToolClips: an investigation of contextual video assistance for functionality understanding. ACM CHI, 1515--1524.
[11]
Harper, F.M., Moy, D., and Konstan, J.A. (2009). Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites. CHI, 759--768.
[12]
Harper, F.M., Raban, D., Rafaeli, S., and Konstan, J.A. (2008). Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites. ACM CHI, 865--874.
[13]
Hartmann, B., MacDougall, D., Brandt, J., Klemmer, S.R. (2010). What would other programmers do: suggesting solutions to error messages. CHI, 1019--1028.
[14]
Horowitz, D., and Kamvar, S.D. (2010). The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine. WWW, 431--440.
[15]
Li, W., Matejka, J., Gossman, T., Konstan, J.A., and Fitzmaurice, G. (2011 -- in press). Design and Evalua-tion of a Command Recommendation System for Software Applications. ACM TOCHI.
[16]
Mamykina, L., Manoim, B., Mittal, M., Hripcsak, G., and Hartmann, B. (2011). Design Lessons from the Fastest Q&A Site in the West. ACM CHI, 2857--2866.
[17]
Matejka, J., Li, W., Grossman, T., and Fitzmaurice, G. (2009). CommunityCommands: command recommend-ations for software applications. ACM UIST, 193--202.
[18]
Matejka, J., Li, W., Grossman, T., and Fitzmaurice, G. (2011). Ambient Help. ACM CHI, 2751--2760.
[19]
Nam, K.K., Ackerman, M.S., and Adamic, L.A. (2009). Questions in, knowledge in?: a study of naver's question answering community. ACM CHI, 779--788.
[20]
Pal, A., and Konstan, J.A. (2010). Expert Identification in Community Question Answering: Exploring Question Selection Bias. ACM CIKM, 1505--1508.
[21]
Singh V and Twidale MB. (2008). The confusion of crowds: non-dyadic help interactions. CSCW, 699--702.
[22]
Singh V, Twidale MB, and Rathi D. (2006). Open Source Technical Support: A Look at Peer Help-Giving. IEEE HICSS, 6, 118c-118c.
[23]
Twidale, M. B. (2005). Over the Shoulder Learning: Supporting Brief Informal Learning. CSCW, 505--547.
[24]
Welser, H.T., Gleave, E., Barash, V., Smith, M., and Meckes, J. (2009). Whither the Experts? Social Affordances and the Cultivation of Experts in Community Q&A Systems. IEEE ICCSIT, 4, 450--455.
[25]
Yeh, T., Chang, T., and Miller, R.C. (2009). Sikuli: using GUI screenshots for search and automation. UIST, 183--192.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Older Adults' Collaborative Learning Dynamics When Exploring Feature-Rich SoftwareProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373788:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)HelpCall: Designing Informal Technology Assistance for Older Adults via VideoconferencingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642938(1-23)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)AQuA: Automated Question-Answering in Software Tutorial Videos with Visual AnchorsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642752(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. IP-QAT: in-product questions, answers, & tips

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '11: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2011
    654 pages
    ISBN:9781450307161
    DOI:10.1145/2047196
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 16 October 2011

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Q&A
    2. community
    3. help
    4. in-product learning

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    UIST '11

    Acceptance Rates

    UIST '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 262 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

    Upcoming Conference

    UIST '25
    The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
    September 28 - October 1, 2025
    Busan , Republic of Korea

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)8
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Older Adults' Collaborative Learning Dynamics When Exploring Feature-Rich SoftwareProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373788:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
    • (2024)HelpCall: Designing Informal Technology Assistance for Older Adults via VideoconferencingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642938(1-23)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)AQuA: Automated Question-Answering in Software Tutorial Videos with Visual AnchorsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642752(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2023)User Perspectives on Branching in Computer-Aided DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36102207:CSCW2(1-30)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)From Discovery to Adoption: Understanding the ML Practitioners’ Interpretability JourneyProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596046(2304-2325)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
    • (2022)Towards More Gender-Inclusive Q&AsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555676:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Thinking about help systemsProceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3554364.3559116(1-12)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
    • (2022)PONI: A Personalized Onboarding Interface for Getting Inspiration and Learning About AR/VR CreationNordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3546155.3546642(1-14)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
    • (2022)InterWeave: Presenting Search Suggestions in Context Scaffolds Information Search and SynthesisProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545696(1-16)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Tech Help Desk: Support for Local Entrepreneurs Addressing the Long Tail of Computing ChallengesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517708(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media